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It probably does no harm to have a plan; to
have thought about what you would like to happen, and then, with a plan in
place, to do as much as you can to make it happen.That seems to be a recipe for getting the
most out of the bumpy ride that is opportunity, for making sure that what
little time you have is well spent.But
too much planning can get in the way of the delightful surprises and shocks
that come along to mess up your day in the best and most unpredictable way.
Failure to prepare has well known consequences, but over preparation turns you
into a clock watching bore and a trip into a timetable.

I had not planned to go to Arizona, so I
thought it more necessary than usual to prepare.

It was an opportunity that dropped into my
lap in an otherwise work dull morning.It was a gift horse and appropriately I have no skill or interest in
dentistry. Outside my office window it was early autumn, but in Arizona it
would be early spring.And in spring, a
young man’s mind turns to thoughts of returning migrants.Or roadrunners.Or hummingbirds.Or something.

Soon my mind was spinning with the
possibilities of the things I could see – I discovered that there are in fact
two species of roadrunner (three if you include the Warner Brothers creation)
and hundreds of species of humming birds.From this basket clutch of diversity I managed to narrow my aim down to
the Greater Roadrunner and Anna’s Hummingbird.This was the shortest of short lists, but despite my best efforts to
think otherwise, Arizona was a work trip not a birding expedition.I needed to keep things in perspective.Better a sip of single malt than a bottle of
backyard hooch.Quality over quantity.

It rapidly became clear that identifying a
roadrunner would not be much of problem.This ground living cuckoo looks like very little else on Earth – the
resemblance to a skinny chicken is clear and its snake chasing abilities
legendary.If I saw one I was sure I
would know what it was.

Broad Billed Hummingbird

Hummingbirds?Well that would be a horse of another colour.

And colour seemed to be the fundamental
problem. As far as I could tell from my rather old guidebook, hummingbirds are basically
green, with long beaks and the ability to fly backwards and sideways at high
speed.And they can do this whilst
concealing the few distinguishing feathery marks they possess. To be fair, the
book did mention differences in throat colour, but that seemed like asking
people to differentiate between inevitably red Ferraris by the shape of their
wheel nuts – possible in theory, but only ever achievable by fanatics (or my
son!). I’ve been a birder of some sort on an off all of my life, but my ability
to identify rapidly moving, often disappearing, green blurs is still
rudimentary.

I did not feel confident. I decided I
needed professional help.

I am still jet lagged and eating my plastic
spoon breakfast when my phone chirps.Laurens, my guide for the day, is outside my motel in Scottsdale – about
half an hour early due to light traffic and an early start.We talk over what claims to be coffee.I liberate a couple of breakfast bananas for
lunch, grab the small mountain of gear I insist I need, and head for the
car.

Almost immediately the day list starts to
grow – grackles in the car park, doves and ravens by the side of the road, and
overhead an adult Bald Eagle.This last
bird generates even more interest that a normal eagle sighting – a bird
unusually out of place and worth noting. An American kestrel on a roadside
wire. Flocks of distant dark birds, which are probably more grackles.I watch treetops and wire spreads, damp
ditches and irrigation canals. I hope
Laurens watches the traffic.A Great
Blue Heron from a roadside pond, its wings, legs and neck tangled and splayed –
once it the air it regains some semblance of order, with tucked neck and
trailing legs.

The slow tick tock of conversation bounces
from seat to seat, as two people who have never met find a shared ground of
birds seen and missed, and in the language of habitat and ecosystem.Birds of a feather, flocking together.There is no talk of earth energy or
crystals.There is talk of physics and
biology, of form and function, cause and effect.And eventually, inevitably, there is talk of
the possibility of hummingbirds and roadrunners.Which is really talk of probability and
chance. The car heads west on roads made familiar by their total newness.I recognise a few plants from the trip to
Sedona and beyond.My uncertain internal
compass, skewed by another change of hemisphere, spins and misses even the
cardinal points.I know the sky is up
and the ground is down.All else is
conjecture. I feel lost.I am pulled
back by conversations of home, of things I knew, of places I had been.

Broad Billed Hummingbird

We pull off the road and over popcorn
gravel into a car park.Boyce Thompson
Arboretum looks like a garden centre, with pot plants spread on wooden trestle
tables, offered for sale.The compass
point spins and spins.Why are we
here?A charm of lesser goldfinches
lifts from the car-side plants, and by the gate a Northern Cardinal, blood red
and obvious, feeds on the soft berry seeds of head-high bush.The question is answered.The compass point settles.

The garden beds and pathways are slightly
down at heel, but clearly not unloved.Plants, some labelled, some not, drift over the edges, softening the
lines of human design.Where garden beds
meet at corners, damp patches, faint with moss, form. Grackles shuffle peck
through the greenery, seeking food, flicking away the unwanted, the inedible.Dark feathers ripple through black and
blue.Although they are a common bird,
they remain undiminished by abundance. I
try to get close enough to take photographs, but the corner shadows resist,
placing a black bird in darkness.I take
another two steps forward and immediately lose interest.

A small wooden shade building sits at the
meeting of three or four paths.Around
the base of the building are plants heavy with brightly coloured flowers.Hanging from the roof of the building are
small bird feeders, charged with a clear liquid.And surrounding both are hummingbirds.

Lots of hummingbirds.

Laurens starts to name the species.Anna’s.Coasta’s. Broadbilled.Males. Females.Look left.Look right.Just look.It’s a jump-start kaleidoscope of
biodiversity.Surprising in the extreme
and wonderful to behold.I had seen
hummers the day before, but with the exception of a ten second view in Sedona,
they had been tree top silhouette, robbed of colour, identifiable only by their
remarkable, defining outline.

These birds were alive with colour and
speed.Flying jewels of emerald, with
flashes of brightness at throat and tail tip.Photography was rendered almost pointless by the abundance of
possibility.Where to look? What to focus
on?The buzz of wings behind and to the
side, a flicker of fire here and there.I did not want to see these sights as just more TV, filtered through the
eye of the lens.I just wanted to
watch.

Anna's Hummingbird

The sight of these birds, just a short walk
from the car park, and their apparent abundance was surprising in at least two
ways.Firstly it seemed too easy; as if
nature had given up a gift with too little work on my behalf.Surely, such things should only be seen on
mountain tops, or deep in the heart of forests, untouched by blade or sharp
toothed saw. This, of course, is
nonsense.Nature is not conscious of any
of my efforts, the birds are here for their own purposes alone, and I am
nothing more than an obstacle to easy flight. A mobile, and sometimes scary form in a
landscape mapped by food plants and nest sights, with territory edges
maintained by hormones, display and bright colours.The fact that their world and mine overlap is
a coincidence for them and a boon for me.

The second surprise runs deeper, all the
way back to a flickering black and white TV in a chill house in Somerset.All the way back to a man in pale trousers
and light blue shirts, speaking in hushed whispers about things I would never
see.About whales, wombats and wide-open
spaces, red deserts and tall mountains.About bowers and birds of paradise.And sometimes, about hummingbirds too.

Such birds seemed impossibly exotic, and
frail beyond belief.How could they fly
as they do, migrating away from the cold of the winter, being drawn back by the
longer days of spring?Even on the grey
scale TV you could see the frantic energy needed to drink from hanging
flowers.A high-octane lifestyle that I
would surely never witness.But here
they were and here I was.Enchanted.I could have stayed
all day, but the birds moved on in search of sweeter pastures, and so,
reluctantly, did I.

And just around the corner it all started
again.

This time the birds seemed a little more
cooperative; sitting on bush branches while I moved slowly forward, feeding on
hanging flowers for more than a second at a time.Time enough to focus.Time enough to compose.Time enough to know I could put the camera to
one side, and just watch.Which is what
I did.

We moved off to a small pool, where swallows
hawked for insects. American Coots, looking less bald than the ones I am used
to, proved that bad-temperedness is a family trait as they chased each other
around the weedy edges of the pond.New
birds kept coming – sparrows, wrens, thrashers – but the cup was already full
and more became just more again as it overflowed.I kept seeing hummingbirds and the wonder
never ceased.

But finally, something did break through
and almost top the bejewelled hummers.Walking down a path flanked with pale barked gum trees – a vision and
smell of home – Laurens stopped to listen.He had his head tipped to one side, in a pose that favoured sound over
sight.I could hear nothing different,
but then my ears were full of unfamiliar sounds.The familiarity of the trees clashed with the
alien soundscape, and I had no idea where to look or what to listen for. The trees formed a skeleton of familiarity,
but the sensory cloth that hung from it was unknown.With the still head and fast hands of a well
practiced watcher Laurens lifted his binoculars to his eyes.“There!Vermillion Flycatcher”.Following
his eye line into the treetops there it was.A patch of pure, blood red colour.Even when I could see in the field of my own binoculars, and watch its
beak open and close, I had difficulty linking the movement to its call.Photography was next to impossible, too
high, too distant, too small.But the
view through the glasses was stunning.I
could but hope that a female unseen in the trees appreciated the show as much
as I did. This was, for me, an
unexpected bird, a treat bird, a bird unlooked for.

Anna's Hummingbird

On the way back to the car park it dawned
on me that we had not seen any Roadrunners.Was I disappointed? – well, yes.But did it concern me? – not really.On a day of emeralds and rubies, it would have been greedy to ask for
more.

I step from the bus into another car
park. The landscape around me is
red. Red soil, red stones, red pillars
and cliffs. If it were painted, it would
look unreal.

The red rocks of Sedona spring from the
ground with a rough edged, youthful kind of enthusiasm. Not for them the well rounded, whale back
lines of other, older, landscapes. Of
course, the formation of the red cliffs, pillars and domes has taken a time
unconnected to a single life and the rocks themselves are 300 million years
old. Geology relies on numbers with
vapour trails of zeros, numbers that drift off towards a failure of
understanding. Numbers that simply stack
oldness upon oldness.

But the sharp lines of the land show that
it is still active and alive, that its geology is not dormant, that process is
overcoming permanence. Sedona sits on a
great plateau that is being pushed upwards from below. As the land grows higher, the forces of
erosion and weathering cut it back down, creating the sharp edges and steep
slopes. Here the land may rise an inch
in a human lifetime. It’s a landscape that, geologically speaking, is sprinting
into the sky. It’s a landscape that
shows how deep time and small changes can cause remarkable things.

It’s also a landscape on to which people
seem compelled to force meaning, but not necessarily understanding.

Even before we get out of the bus, our
guide is talking about Earth Energy, crystals and vortexes. I feel my spirits sag. Sure, the domes of rock are impressive, and
they do take on the form of giant funnels – or even the swirl of water as it
disappears down the plughole of a bath.
But to explain these shapes in the landscape through spinning centres of
energy, some coming up from the depths of the Earth, others retuning form
whence it came, seems a step beyond credible imagination. It seems to be an explanation that reaches
for significance, but fails to bring meaning, and in doing so, overlooks the
simple grain at a time reality of geology.
I am unsure if the other passengers on the bus feel as I do. In that
situation I take the easy – if possibly cowardly – way out; I walk away and
stay silent.

Maybe it’s the ghost of a bad night’s
sleep, maybe it’s the lack of my own family rudder, but I feel adrift. (There is, of course, the possibility that
negative Earth energy could be corrupting my aura, but I consider that
unlikely.) The landscape is remarkable, but I keep finding things that sit
between it and me. Human things. Imposed things. Things that take away my attention. Back at the bus the guide names the rocks
around us: Courthouse, Cathedral, Capitol, Bell. All but one are named for agents of control –
maybe even repression – as if somebody has tried to take a landscape and make
it their own, knowing deep down that it was somebody else’s first. It was done in Australia, and it seems to
have been done here too. If you wipe
away the memory of all that went before, in your mind you have a clean slate,
to claim as your own. And in an empty
land, it’s easy to ignore the people who were there first. The landscape is
beautiful, one I would love to explore, but my thoughts are unsettling. I feel like an uncharitable guest, a
conclusion jumper on an air-conditioned day tour.

And then things get worse.

Before we enter the main strip of Sedona,
we turn off for Chapel of the Holy Cross.
Seen from below the chapel is a concrete building, with a coffin shaped
outer skin, and an inner skeleton of a single cross. Initially the building seems intriguing, but
then a series of dark connections start to form in my mind. The guidebook says that the Chapel “sits
upon” two small red-rock domes. But to
my mind the better words would be “sits within”. The visual connection between crosses and
swords is clear for all to see – the handle, guards and blade of a sword form a
perfect cross. And here in this
building, the blade of the sword is being driven into stone beneath it. If the shape and form of these rocks did
mean (or does mean) something to people, then this seems to be nothing short of
symbolic murder, or at least, assault.

As a kid I would often visit the town of Glastonbury
in the green of the Somerset countryside, another town rich in crystal readings
and talk of energy. But it is also an
epicentre of things Arthurian – the man-myth who became King by removing a
sword from a stone. In Sedona, a culture
becomes king by driving a sword into a stone.

On the pathway to the chapel, people make
exclamations of faith, and stop to throw money on to the surrounding stones in
the hope of influencing the future.
Around the edges of the ancient pathways that lead towards Glastonbury,
archaeologists find concentrations of coins, jewellery and bladed weapons,
thrown into the long gone waters, presumably in the hope of influencing the
future too. Ancient rituals and modern
faith. Pagan ritual on the way to
church.

On a sharp corner, below the chapel, cars
and vans park so that people can use the two portable toilets that have been
placed there because there are none at the chapel itself. At the top of the hill one thing happens and
at the bottom of the hill, it’s something else.

By the time we leave the chapel I need time
and space. A place to think. A place to stop thinking. A place that does not feel like I am standing
downstream of a bad idea. A place to look for the things that make sense to me;
I go looking for water.

Oak Creek and its self made canyon run
through Sedona like a breath of fresh air. Although homes and hotels flanked
the part of it I saw, it was mercifully free from signs and symbols. There was only a single sign that read “No
Trespassing”. It had been shot through
at least ten times. I struggled to know
if that itself was a good or a bad thing.

The river was so clear that only the
turbulence at the surface betrayed the water’s presence. A gap in the clouds let the Sun peek through
to show each and every grain on the tumbled rocks on the riverbed. I hoped for fish, but found ducks and squirrels
instead. American Widgeon whistled to
each other as they gathered in the hope of thrown snacks, and further upstream
a pair of Wood Duck – the male richly coloured and ornate – cast suspicious
glances at me before taking flight. A
squirrel splayed its legs around a tree trunk as it paused to watch me. Tail flicks and high-pitched chattering
suggested he was not best pleased to see me.
The feeling was not mutual. Many of last year’s leaves were still fluffy
packed between the water washed stones on the bank – I could feel another
Webber B fracture in the offing. A large
rounded stone – maybe even a boulder – offered safety, rest and a patch of
sunlight. I accepted them all. Small lizards, a surprise in the valley
chill, emerged from hiding to sit in the sunshine too. There were still no fish.

Clouds moved at speed across the sky,
shedding their sea-born loads, eager to get somewhere else. The water in the river was slowly gaining
colour, its deeper parts hiding the bed.
It must have been raining upstream all morning.

The path back up from the water opened the
view of the whole creek, dense with trees, flanked by steep cliffs. Thick banks of cloud gathered around the
valley edge and threatened rain. My
mother would have said the blue-grey clouds promised snow. Later in the afternoon she would have be
proved to be correct.

I had entered Sedona feeling a kind of
pressure building in me. The kind of
pressure that comes when people ask you questions you don’t want to answer
truthfully. A conflict between the role
of the guest and the role of self, where you have little right to impose your
opinions, but failing to do so feels dishonest.
It’s a fine line to tread.
Internally I stray, my face probably an open book.

In the last patch of vegetation before I
return to the car park a jewelled flash of life lands on a branch in front of
me. It’s an Anna’s Humming Bird. This is no silhouette of a bird, but a full
view. Metallic feathers. Sparkling colours. A tongue that seems to be licking its needle
beak, seeking a last drop of nectar. I
don’t know who Anna was, but her bird sits for no more than ten perfect
seconds, departing in a blur of wing buzz speed.

Each to their own. I found what I was looking for down by the
creek, in the noisy silence of a dry leaf woodland, slowly waking from winter. I found it in the threat of spring snow. In chance encounters with birds, squirrels and
sun hungry lizards. I took away more
than I left, and while no place is unchanged by our presence, I doubt that the
next person to walk that path would know I had been there. The next visitors can make of it what they
will, but they don’t need me, or my signs or symbols. Whatever fine line I was walking has
broadened.

By the time I reach the car park, some
sense of balance has been restored.

Alert

As the bus winds up road, the morning rains
wash down the creek to towards us. The
water time travels through the landscape and gives a glimpse into the
future. As the water browns and rises, a
heron is flushed from the creek, and inexplicably lands on the road in front of
us. It’s a bird defined by length,
spindly and fine. It looks at the bus along the length of its beak and takes
flight to a more fishy location. Heavy
rain pounds the windows and the road runs with water. Maybe the heron knew what it was doing.

I notice the bus has no windscreen wipers.
The rain is being pushed by the speed of the wind, beading and flowing upwards
and outwards, taking some kind of water repelling substance with it. Another residue being added to the soil and
water we all share. Another
complication, produced to save us from the toil of flicking a switch cunningly
hidden behind the steering wheel. I feel
the line thinning, and turn to watch the rain become snow.

There is little conversation within the bus;
the grey of the sky seems to have seeped through the windows and doors. The snow becomes heavier but then suddenly
stops. We stop to look a small
waterfall, but drive past a rock arch.
The uncertain weather tries its hand once more at rain.

Eventually we pull into a car park next to
some heavy wooden buildings. A common
Raven looks up from its exploration of a litterbin. Even with the bus door open, the only sound
is silence. I get out and, appropriately enough, turn my collar to the cold and
damp. I know where I am but I don’t
really believe it. How can what we have
come to see still be hidden? How can the
most famous hole in the ground, a canyon so large it really is Grand, be just
over there, but still out of sight?

A slight rise leads away from the car park
towards a waist high rough stonewall.
The raven waits on the wall, watching a second tumble through the
air. The airborne bird flashes below the
level of the wall, flying too fast to avoid the collision with the ground that
never comes. It reappears at the same time as my line of sight passes the top
of the wall. Void. Air. Absence. A deep space where logic would tell
you none should be. The trick of
perspective hides the Grand Canyon until you are nearly on top of it, nearly in
it, and reveals it like a surprise. You
know it’s going to be huge, and you know when you are going to see it, but the
rush of revelation is shock. It goes from
hidden to visible in a few footfalls. If
the contours were reversed, so that the Earth had been thrown up rather than
worn down, you would have been seeing for hours; the skyline, and maybe even
gravity itself, would have been buckled by the presence on the horizon.

But you stand there, feeling the tug of
vertigo, secretly thankful for the litigation preventing wall and stare through
sky where there should be land. And down
below, in the canyon base, you catch a glimpse of the Colorado River, robbed of
the colour that gave it its name by the stillness upstream. A small thing, green and clear. A river tamed by dams, and human
slowness. A river that, in the past, cut
down and through layer after layer of rock, down to some ancient foundation, hard
enough to resist. A river that, a grain
at a time, formed the Grand Canyon.

If in carelessness, or deep sadness, you
stepped from the stonewall and out into space, you would fall down through the
long history of the Earth, travelling the layered time machine of the stacked
strata until, with brutal suddenness, you would come to sudden halt at rocks
laid down almost 2 billion years ago. A
collision of the two concrete realities that drive the world – geology and
physics. You would have fallen through a
time scale as unimaginable as the terror of the fall itself. The exposure of such rocks and the creation
of such a landscape, would be impossible without the same time unimaginable and
a river, cutting down as the land rises up to meet it, shifting the world from one place to another one
grain at a time.

It is in such places as this that the
beauty of simplicity is revealed.

In such places there is a need for the
company of the ones you love. In the
face of the simple scale and extent of world you can feel small and alone
without a hand to hold, without a flash of red hair or a disbelieving look,
changing into a startled smile. With
camera in hand I do my best to capture the fleeting surprise, the startled air
of a place so big. Deep down I know this
is probably futile.

Above the canyon the sky seems stretched
thin, like a response to the presence of air where there should be Earth. Weak sunshine pulls distant faces close, and
darkness pushes the close further away.
Above me the roulette of weather rests briefly on fine. Soon the snow starts again. Soon the cold returns with a sharp wind. Too soon, we have to leave.

The
possibility of sleep

When we pull over again we are on the edge
of another desert. Not the desert with
cartoon perfect cactus we had passed through this morning, but one painted with
soft light, cut through by the straight lines of wires and fences, rising to a
horizon smoked with cloud. What grass
there is, grown from a flush of September rain, has been baked down to a pale
yellow brown. Wind blown fragments hang
on wire fences and twist in the sharp wind.
The sand at my feet has a slight cast of red, and is studded with
hundreds of pebbles, some of which were crystals, clear and shiny.

The late afternoon light is low and
metallic, gold and copper. The crystals
shine. Moving your head from side to
side makes them sparkled. I pick up a fistful of sand and let it flow through
my fingers. The pebbles rattle as I
shake my hand. The sky is wonderful, but
I was still looking at the ground. I
roll the pebbles in my hand – most are rounded – and that’s what attracted my
attention. Round stones means
water. In the desert. A long, long time ago.

I tip my hand to the side and the stones
slide off and fall back to the sandy ground.
People notice what I am doing and look at the ground too – eager hands started
collecting the crystals. I wish they had
not noticed.

I step away to look at the sky. It’s
huge. Storm clouds push from one side,
the sun from another. Wires that sing in
the wind also catch the last of the light.
I lie on the ground to see the sky.
When I stand up I brush the sand from my hand; desert sand, water sand.

Back in the van, people curl up as best
they can to sleep. I wonder what will
happen to the collected stones. I wonder
how many will end up pushed to the back of cupboards in fragile plastic bags,
forgotten, or ignored.

There is
still sand on my hands. I roll the grains between my thumb and first finger
until they fall to the floor, one grain at a time.

Out of the window the landscape flickers,
flashes and merges. The close is rapid,
the distant still. A fleeing earth, a
constant sky. A parallax warped
vision. I think about the day, one
grainy flicker frame at a time.

It would soon be dark. A long day was ending. A strange and good day was ending.